Radio Signal Spawns 'Alien' Art

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Radio Signal Spawns 'Alien' Art

BERKELEY, California – In February 2003, the giant telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico – made famous by its appearance in the James Bond movie GoldenEye – picked up a radio signal from the sky. This signal was recorded on magnetic tape, sent to the SETI@home project in Berkeley and then outsourced to more than 5 million screensavers across the planet for analysis. Two computers confirmed that the signal had been observed twice before, only this time it was stronger.

Click here for photos of the alien artwork.Though promising as an example of an extraterrestrial transmission due to its repetition, frequency and increasing strength, the signal was discarded as an anomaly and the hype surrounding it was dismissed by many experts in the field, including SETI@home chief scientist Dan Wertheimer.

"There are a lot of people that got interested in this signal when we first reported it," says Wertheimer. "We ourselves were not that interested in it."

In 2005, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats revisited the signal as part of research for a nascent project on extraterrestrial life. Keats' previous projects include copyrighting his brain, attempting to genetically engineer God, and taking a hundred-year-long exposure of a San Francisco hotel room.

"I'm probably the last person to get interested in this," he says. "I'd even been to Roswell already and I hadn't bought a single one of those alien dolls."

But the false positives of alien life perplexed and intrigued him. "I wondered what people are looking at that they keep thinking that they're onto something and then they aren't, and maybe I should have a look at these signals myself," he says.

Viewing SHGb02+14a through an artistic lens, Keats was able to apply a few simple rule sets to translate the points from the signal plotted by the SETI project into visually abstract paintings. The radio frequencies became light frequencies in the color spectrum – plotted on the horizontal axis – and the passage of time became the vertical axis. The color and placement of each point was then translated into concentric circles, vertical lines or lines that connect the dots to a central point of the signal.

Using Adobe InDesign and giclee inkjet technology, Keats then printed the abstractions onto giant canvases to be displayed in an exhibit. He also framed printouts of his methodology for each painting.

He was offered exhibit space at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, a Jewish gallery in Berkeley, California, as a contributor to its Revisions series. Under the Revisions umbrella, artists are expected to offer an interpretation of the gallery's existing collection. Keats' interpretation involves transmitting artwork back out into space using a citizens band radio and two Slinkys fashioned into a primitive antenna.

"You may wonder why I'm using CB radio to try and communicate with things elsewhere in the universe," says Keats, "and the answer is the FCC. The FCC does not make it easy to communicate intergalactically. For most of the spectrum you have to pay huge licensing fees to get use of it." Despite this setback, Keats is optimistic that the signal will eventually propagate beyond the ionosphere and have a chance at being received.

"It will require beings with incredibly sophisticated tools to tease a signal out from the noise," he admits. "But there's no reason, technically, why they couldn't do so." Keats' next step is to purchase a private satellite and broadcast any willing artists' works directly from space.

But what about the exhibit's actual scientific merits? Keats says he has no pretensions that his project verifies the existence of aliens.

"I'm not out to prove anything, as far as there is or is not intelligent life elsewhere in the universe," he says. "There may be, there may not be. I'm agnostic on that.... But it is a way of approaching the question of whether or not there is and what the nature of such intelligence might be."

For his part, SETI@home's Wertheimer is open to the idea that his program may have missed something, but he's doubtful about any conclusions that this artwork might offer.

"If it's art then I would encourage it, especially if it gets people interested in this stuff," he says. "But my guess is that he doesn't know any more than you or I."